Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold
    The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold
    The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold
    Ebook113 pages1 hour

    The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold

    By Kate Bernheimer

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook


    As a child, Lucy dreams of talking fairies and lives contentedly in the wooded suburbs of Boston; she grows up to be a successful animator of fairy-tale films. Or does she? She claims at moments to be a witch in the woods.
     
    Like her sisters, who appeared in Bernheimer’s first two novels (The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold and The Complete Tales of Merry Gold), Lucy has a secret, but she is unable to fasten onto anything but brightness. Novelist Donna Tartt writes, “Lucy’s particular brand of optimism, blind to its own shadow, is very American—she is innocence holding itself apart so fastidiously that it becomes its opposite.”
     
    This novel is a perfect end to the Gold family series, and the perfect introduction, for new readers, to Bernheimer’s enchanting body of work.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Alabama Press
    Release dateMar 1, 2011
    ISBN9781573668217
    The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold
    Author

    Kate Bernheimer

    Kate Bernheimer has been called “one of the living masters of the fairy tale” (Tin House). She is the author of a novel trilogy and the story collections Horse, Flower, Bird and How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales, and the editor of four anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award winning and bestselling My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales and xo Orpheus: 50 New Myths. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she teaches fairy tales and creative writing.

    Read more from Kate Bernheimer

    Related to The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold

    Related ebooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Jenkins

      Feb 4, 2021

      Jenkins
      6 min read

    • Article

      I Was a Public Schooler

      Jun 9, 2020

      The application to Waverley Glen Academy required that I spend a day sitting in on freshman classes and mixing with the student body to see how well I’d fit in. I was twelve. Picture the gleaming wooden corridors, the Persian rugs, the monogrammed si

      14 min read

    • Article

      Diving Through Windows

      Dec 13, 2017

      BY JUSTIN HOCKING I dwell in Possibilit y — / A fairer House than Prose — / More numerous of Windows — / Superior — for Doors — —Emily Dickinson My wife and I live in a 1907 Craftsman bungalow with original crown glass windows. They were hand-blown i

      6 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: March 2019

      Mar 4, 2019

      For several reasons, there is only one thing I demand from my own lines, or from any poetry I love—I want to read it and to have a sense of having lived. The post Must-Read Poetry: March 2019 appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Paul Tremblay

      Jun 17, 2020

      IT’S ALWAYS BEEN ONE OF MY BIGGEST FEARS that I would live to see the end of everything,” says Paul Tremblay, speaking to SFX from his Massachusetts home in the middle of lockdown. It’s a singularly peculiar time, and a peculiar interview for him to

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Prophet of Nothingness

      Sep 12, 2021

      The Prophet of Nothingness
      9 min read

    • Article

      Clarice Lispector’s Children’s Story Taught Me to Read Her Like An Adult

      Mar 17, 2017

      Filmmaker Pedro Almodovar was asked to write an introduction to the translated edition of Clarice Lispector’s final novel Breath of Life. Instead of a formal introduction, his refusal letter was published and said this of Lispector’s work: “Each phra

      7 min read

    • Article

      Elephant In The City Of Blind

      Feb 6, 2020

      Elephant In The City Of Blind
      5 min read

    • Article

      An Anti-Racist Poetry Reading List

      Jun 8, 2020

      These recent poetry collections offer poignant narratives and snapshots of racial injustice in America. The post An Anti-Racist Poetry Reading List appeared first on The Millions.

      1 min read

    • Article

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Winslow, Kois, Tóibín, and More

      Jan 17, 2023

      Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new release titles from De’Shawn Charles Winslow, Dan Kois, Colm Tóibín, and more—that are publishing this week. Want to learn more about upcoming titles? Then go read our most recent book preview. Want to he

      7 min read

    • Article

      Cooking with Shirley Jackson

      Oct 31, 2019

      Cooking with Shirley Jackson
      10 min read

    • Article

      Chouette

      Nov 12, 2021

      Chouette
      16 min read

    • Article

      As 'Adventure Time' Wraps, A Look Back At How The Series Broke Barriers And Changed The Genre

      Aug 31, 2018

      In 2010, a new cartoon debuted with these bold lines. "Princess Bubblegum," asks Finn, a human boy, "when we bring the dead back to life, will they be filled with worms?" "No," Princess Bubblegum replies. "If my Decorpsinator serum works, then all th

      9 min read

    • Article

      Devil Asks Why You Would Mouth The Word Pity

      Jul 1, 2022

      even in this abundance of dark? Even in this abundance of dark you have totake the stars on faith. Look: Under today’s dim sky there is a basket.In that basket there is a fish. Come night, you are the animal that will eat the best parts of it. And ye

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Puppet Theater

      Dec 1, 2020

      Olgi says she’s going to take me somewhere and show me something I’ve never seen before. We walk through a door into an inner courtyard, then from there into another one, then into a third one, where there is a wire fence. Olgi knows where the fence

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Other Child

      Dec 1, 2018

      The Other Child
      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold

    4/5

    5 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Shock and excitement! I did not think I would get this goodreads giveaway as the odds were very slim. I enjoyed this reading experience but how do I even begin to describe a book like this?? There's a bit of magic, some transformations, and even talking animals; all this and more bundled in a modern setting.

      There are four children in the Gold family. Merry full of anger, Ketzia full of sorrow, an unnamed and seemingly indifferent brother, and the youngest sibling Lucy. Lucy Gold is filled with bliss and happiness, but that unyielding brightness takes her to a dark place. Her tales unfold along a nonlinear narrative. The stories bounce freely between the grown-up Lucy and the events of her early life.

      A dense little book! I caught myself rereading passages. There were some I loved. I could just close my eyes and steep myself in the imagery they evoked. I liked the blank spaces and how my mind filled them with my own secrets. This giveaway was a nice way to be introduced to Kate Berheimer and I'll be checking out her other work in the future.

    Book preview

    The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold - Kate Bernheimer

    Ketzia

    chapter one

    THE GOLDEN KEY

    One winter day, when the ground outside my cottage was covered in snow, I went into the forest to bring back some wood. I loaded the wood onto a sled. I was so cold, I thought I would make a fire and sit beside it a while before I went home. No one waited for me in the cottage, apart from the dear spiders and mice. I cleared a space in the snow by scraping at it with a stick, intending to sit down and warm my bones. Soon I uncovered a golden key. Where there's a key, I thought, there is surely some magic. You might expect that I desired to dig more, and discover a locked iron box. You might expect me to have wished that this iron box were full of glittering things. You might expect me to have fit the key perfectly into the lock of the box, and that I would have turned it and turned it with hope. You might even wonder what terrible marvels I found in there, what sadness or evil they brought into the world. Yet I had no such desire to discover the sadness or evil. Sure as the forest is made up of trees and dirt and needles and worms, these are now and can always be lucky trees and dirt and needles and worms. It's a trick of the mind, this desire for peace. Yet just the same, I can assure you no story has ever waited for me. Only the darkened night with death by three. All happiness once was taken from me. Please solve the riddle; I can no longer speak.

    chapter two

    Under the bed, in a worn cardboard shoebox, lies a stuffed monkey with a pink and smudged face, and a pink satin ribbon taped onto one ear. The monkey wears a pink plastic helmet and used to hang from the ceiling tied to a rope. Lucy Gold, the youngest of the four children, got the monkey from Ketzia, who got it from Merry. The monkey skipped over the brother, as it was pink. (He preferred rose, he always said.)

    Lucy abides by favorite things—especially colors. Once, she overheard an angular woman announce to Mrs Gold in the kitchen, I disdain whimsy, and wondered how anyone could. Lucy prefers whimsy to anything else—except perhaps Monkee, with her almost-gone fur and fraying rope—or was it a noose, as Merry once said? Lucy rejects the creepiness of the noose-notion, and concentrates rapt attention on the goodly essence of the poignant, sad monkey.

    Though very young, Lucy has already learned quite a bit about the world that she lives in, the attention that it desires: about her two older sisters who don't get along and about how to get along with both of them well. She sees that the straight-haired one who cries is annoying to the curly-haired one who is mean; and she sees that to avoid annoying the mean one, she must exude charm. To avoid hurting the sad one, she must comfort her lavishly in private.

    Lucy has learned that her brother does not have much to do with the sisters, including herself, though he does not seem to have much to do with anything at all except maybe his blocks. He does like having his fingernails painted by Grandma—and who doesn't, with that lamp in the shape of a hand that you rest your own hand upon during the painting? (Glows yellow, gets warm.)

    The only naturally sunny child of all the Gold girls, Lucy cherishes the airy nursery room in which she sleeps, with its orange gauze curtains and the heater's radiant hiss. Ketzia and Merry sleep in two newer rooms down the hall: Ketzia's pink, containing a dollhouse, Merry's green and featuring a toadstool lamp. The brother's room is blue. Mysteriously it glows with video games. In summer, a box set in Lucy's windowsill roars. Each night, whether winter or summer, autumn or spring, Lucy lies perfectly still in her sleep: stunning expression upon her face, hands clasped under her chin. On the pink sheets are depicted green fairies, half moons and violet

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1